When bad things happen to us that we think we can’t bear, we marvel at how we get through them. When our dreams come true, the “happiness” we thought we would experience is neither as intense nor lasts as long as we thought! But why?
The desire to achieve happiness is the fundamental dynamic underlying everything we do, from childhood to the end of our lives. We believe that if we get accepted to a good school, if we have our dream job, if we marry the person we fall in love with, we will be happy. We expect that achieving our goals will bring happiness. When this happens, we sometimes feel really happy, but it usually doesn’t last very long. This is because of a psychological process called hedonic adaptation.
What is Hedonic Adaptation?
Hedonic adaptation means that the emotional impact of both positive and negative events diminishes over time, so people get used to their situation.
There is a large body of scientific research on happiness. The most famous of these is the one on the happiness levels of people after experiencing events that were expected to lead to great happiness and events that were expected to lead to great unhappiness. In this study, the happiness levels of people who won the lottery jackpot and people who were paralyzed as a result of an accident were examined. The general expectation was that the former would spend the rest of his/her life happy and the latter unhappy. One year later, when the people who had the experiences were given a test to determine their level of happiness again, it was found that almost all of them had returned to the level of happiness they had experienced one year earlier.
People can develop hedonic adaptations to one-off events, such as divorce, or to recurrent events, such as undergoing chemotherapy every month. As long as the situation does not change, hedonic adaptation makes it easier to cope with its effects. But if the situation changes, for example if chemotherapy sessions become more frequent, a new process of hedonic adaptation begins.
In short, hedonic adaptation means that we have a tendency to return to a basic level of happiness despite all the ups and downs in life. In psychology, this is also called the hedonic treadmill, because no matter how active we are in our quest to increase our level of happiness, we usually end up going back to our old level of happiness.
You might have thought that hedonic adaptation is a bad thing in that it causes happiness to be short-lived. On the contrary, hedonic adaptation is vital for our psychological health. It’s how we stabilize our minds. Moreover, we would not be able to focus on new stimuli if our old emotions did not weaken over time. It is through the process of hedonic adaptation that we are able to leave behind everything that has happened, good or bad, adapt to new situations and move forward.
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